{‘I spoke total twaddle for a brief period’: The Actress, The Veteran Performer and More on the Dread of Performance Anxiety
Derek Jacobi experienced a instance of it during a world tour of Hamlet. Bill Nighy grappled with it preceding The Vertical Hour debuting on Broadway. Juliet Stevenson has compared it to “a malady”. It has even caused some to take flight: One comedian vanished from Cell Mates, while Another performer left the stage during Educating Rita. “I’ve utterly gone,” he remarked – though he did come back to complete the show.
Stage fright can cause the jitters but it can also provoke a total physical lock-up, to say nothing of a utter verbal block – all right under the gaze. So why and how does it seize control? Can it be conquered? And what does it feel like to be seized by the actor’s nightmare?
Meera Syal describes a common anxiety dream: “I end up in a attire I don’t identify, in a part I can’t recollect, viewing audiences while I’m naked.” Years of experience did not leave her protected in 2010, while performing a preview of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine. “Presenting a solo performance for a lengthy period?” she says. “That’s the thing that is going to give you stage fright. I was truly thinking of ‘doing a Stephen Fry’ just before the premiere. I could see the open door leading to the garden at the back and I thought, ‘If I fled now, they wouldn’t be able to locate me.’”
Syal found the nerve to persist, then promptly forgot her words – but just soldiered on through the confusion. “I stared into the void and I thought, ‘I’ll escape it.’ And I did. The role of Shirley Valentine could be improvised because the entire performance was her talking to the audience. So I just made my way around the set and had a brief reflection to myself until the script came back. I winged it for a short while, uttering total gibberish in role.”
Larry Lamb has faced powerful fear over years of stage work. When he commenced as an non-professional, long before Gavin and Stacey, he loved the practice but acting caused fear. “The instant I got in front of an audience,” he says, “it all started to cloud over. My legs would begin shaking unmanageably.”
The stage fright didn’t diminish when he became a professional. “It continued for about 30 years, but I just got more adept at concealing it.” In 2001, he forgot his lines as Claudius in Hamlet, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. “It was the early performance at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was just into my initial speech, when Claudius is speaking to the people of Denmark, when my dialogue got lost in space. It got worse and worse. The full cast were up on the stage, watching me as I completely lost it.”
He got through that show but the guide recognised what had happened. “He saw I wasn’t in charge but only appearing I was. He said, ‘You’re not connecting to the audience. When the lights come down, you then ignore them.’”
The director kept the general illumination on so Lamb would have to recognise the audience’s presence. It was a pivotal moment in the actor’s career. “Gradually, it got improved. Because we were doing the show for the bulk of the year, gradually the fear vanished, until I was poised and actively interacting with the audience.”
Now 78, Lamb no longer has the energy for stage work but relishes his live shows, performing his own poetry. He says that, as an actor, he kept obstructing of his role. “You’re not allowing the freedom – it’s too much you, not enough role.”
Harmony Rose-Bremner, who was chosen in The Years in 2024, agrees. “Self-awareness and self-doubt go contrary to everything you’re trying to do – which is to be liberated, release, totally lose yourself in the part. The challenge is, ‘Can I make space in my head to let the role through?’” In The Years, as one of five actors all portraying the same woman in various phases of her life, she was excited yet felt daunted. “I’ve been raised doing theatre. It was always my safe space. I didn’t ever think I’d ever feel stage fright.”
She recollects the night of the opening try-out. “I really didn’t know if I could continue,” she says. “It was the first time I’d had like that.” She succeeded, but felt swamped in the very first opening scene. “We were all stationary, just talking into the void. We weren’t looking at one other so we didn’t have each other to respond to. There were just the dialogue that I’d listened to so many times, reaching me. I had the typical indicators that I’d had in miniature before – but never to this extent. The experience of not being able to inhale fully, like your air is being drawn out with a emptiness in your chest. There is nothing to cling to.” It is worsened by the feeling of not wanting to let other actors down: “I felt the responsibility to everybody else. I thought, ‘Can I endure this huge thing?’”
Zachary Hart attributes insecurity for causing his nerves. A spinal condition ended his dreams to be a footballer, and he was working as a machine operator when a acquaintance applied to drama school on his behalf and he enrolled. “Standing up in front of people was completely unfamiliar to me, so at training I would go last every time we did something. I stuck at it because it was total escapism – and was preferable than industrial jobs. I was going to give my all to conquer the fear.”
His initial acting job was in Nicholas Hytner’s Julius Caesar at the Bridge theatre. When the cast were notified the play would be filmed for NT Live, he was “petrified”. A long time later, in the opening try-out of The Constituent, in which he was cast alongside James Corden and Anna Maxwell-Martin, he uttered his initial line. “I perceived my accent – with its distinct Black Country dialect – and {looked
